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Wednesday, October 29, 2014

New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators

Important, troubling read. The following quotes should make us all question this move toward centralization of services that is currently taking place in higher education—and much to the despair of parents that have to account for this through ever higher tuition costs, as well as to the despair of part-time faculty and teaching assistants who "now account for half of
instructional staffs at colleges and universities, up from one-third in
1987, the figures show."

During the same period, the number of
administrators and professional staff has more than doubled. That’s a
rate of increase more than twice as fast as the growth in the number of
students.

The ratio of
nonacademic employees to faculty has also doubled. There are now two
nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at private
universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track member
of the faculty.

Centralization has been
promoted as a way to reduce costs, but Vedder points out that it has
not appeared to reduce the rate of hiring of administrators and
professional staffs on campus—or of incessant spikes in tuition.

“It’s
almost Orwellian,” said Vedder. “They’ll say, ‘We’ll save money if we
centralize.’ Then they hire a provost or associate provost or an
assistant business manager in charge of shared services, and then that
person hires an assistant, and you end up with more people than you
started with.”

New administrative requirements —and the "thousands" of regulations they must follow—related to services that higher education needs to provide are getting blamed for this. But critics aren't buying it. Universities will draw from their state operating budgets to pay for the many staff that help them raise dollars for their capital fundraising campaigns only to turn around and never actually intend for any of money to at least in part go back to staff for pay raises, job upgrading opportunities, improved working conditions and the like. In short, this is tantamount to an attack on workers.We read all the time of the economic polarization that exists and is increasing in our country. Universities are crucibles for this pernicious reinscribing of power relations that exist in our society.-Angela

The number of non-academic administrative and professional
employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the
last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or
faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures.
The
disproportionate increase in the number of university staffers who
neither teach nor conduct research has continued unabated in more recent
years, and slowed only slightly since the start of the economic
downturn, during which time colleges and universities have contended
that a dearth of resources forced them to sharply raise tuition.
In
all, from 1987 until 2011-12—the most recent academic year for which
comparable figures are available—universities and colleges collectively
added 517,636 administrators and professional employees, or an average
of 87 every working day, according to the analysis of federal figures,
by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting in collaboration
with the nonprofit, nonpartisan social-science research group the American Institutes for Research.

“There’s just a mind-boggling amount of money per student that’s
being spent on administration,” said Andrew Gillen, a senior researcher
at the institutes. “It raises a question of priorities.”
Universities
have added these administrators and professional employees even as
they’ve substantially shifted classroom teaching duties from full-time
faculty to less-expensive part-time adjunct faculty and teaching
assistants, the figures show.
“They’ve increased their hiring of
part-time faculty to try and cut costs,” said Donna Desrochers, a
principal researcher at the Delta Cost Project,
which studies higher-education spending. “Yet other factors that are
going on, including the hiring of these other types of non-academic
employees, have undercut those savings.”
Part-time faculty and
teaching assistants now account for half of instructional staffs at
colleges and universities, up from one-third in 1987, the figures show.
During
the same period, the number of administrators and professional staff
has more than doubled. That’s a rate of increase more than twice as fast
as the growth in the number of students.
It’s not possible to
tell exactly how much the rise in administrators and professional
employees has contributed to the increase in the cost of tuition and
fees, which has also almost doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars since
1987 at four-year private, nonprofit universities and colleges, according to the College Board.
Those costs have also nearly tripled at public four-year universities—a
higher price rise than for any other sector of the economy in that
period, including healthcare.
But critics say the unrelenting
addition of administrators and professional staffs can’t help but to
have driven this steep increase.
At the very least, they say, the
continued hiring of nonacademic employees belies university presidents’
insistence that they are doing everything they can to improve
efficiency and hold down costs.
“It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a lie,” said Richard Vedder, an economist and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
“I
wouldn’t buy a used car from a university president,” said Vedder.
“They’ll say, ‘We’re making moves to cut costs,’ and mention something
about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and ignore the new assistant to the
assistant to the associate vice provost they just hired.”
The
figures are particularly dramatic at private, nonprofit universities,
whose numbers of administrators alone have doubled, while their numbers
of professional employees have more than doubled.
Rather than
improving productivity as measured by the ratio of employees to
students, private universities have seen their productivity decline,
adding 12 employees per 1,000 full-time students since 1987, the federal
figures show.
“While the rest of the economy was shrinking
overhead, higher education was investing heavily in more overhead,” said
Robert Martin, an economist at Centre College in Kentucky who studies
university finance who said staffing per students is a valid way to
judge efficiency improvements or declines.
The ratio of
nonacademic employees to faculty has also doubled. There are now two
nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at private
universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track member
of the faculty.
“In no other industry would overhead costs be
allowed to grow at this rate—executives would lose their jobs,” analysts
at the financial management firm Bain & Company wrote in a 2012 white paper for its clients and others about administrative spending in higher education.
Universities
and university associations blame the increased hiring on such things
as government regulations and demands from students and their
families—including students who arrive unprepared for college-level
work—for such services as remedial education, advising, and
mental-health counseling.
“All of those things pile up, and contribute to this increase,” said Dan King, president of the American Association of University Administrators.
“I
think there’s legitimate criticism” of the growth in hiring of
administrators and other nonacademic employees, said King. “At the same
time, you can’t lay all of the responsibility for that on the
universities.”
There are “thousands” of regulations governing the
distribution of financial aid alone, he said. “And probably every
college or university that’s accredited, they’ve got at least one person
with a major portion of their time dedicated to that, and in some cases
whole office staffs. These aren’t bad things to do, but somebody’s got
to do them.”
Since 1987, universities have also started or
expanded departments devoted to marketing, diversity, disability,
sustainability, security, environmental health, recruiting, technology,
and fundraising, and added new majors and graduate and athletics
programs, satellite campuses, and conference centers.
Some of
these, they say—such as beefed-up fundraising and marketing offices—pay
for themselves, and sustainability efforts save money through energy
efficiency.
Others “often show up in student referenda, to build or add services,” said George Pernsteiner, president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. “The students vote for them. Students and their families have asked for more, and are paying more to get it.”
Pressure
to help students graduate more quickly—or at all—has also driven the
increase in professional employees “to try to more effectively serve the
students who are coming in today,” Pernsteiner said.
But
naysayers point out that the doubling of administrative and professional
staffs doesn’t seem to have improved universities’ performance. Since
2002, the proportion of four-year bachelor’s degree-seeking students who
graduate within even six years, for instance, has barely inched up,
from 55 percent to 58 percent, U.S. Department of Education figures show.
“If
we have these huge spikes in student services spending or in other
professional categories, we should see improvements in what they do, and
I personally haven’t seen that,” Gillen said.
Martin said it’s
true that adding services beyond teaching and research is fueling the
growth of campus payrolls. But he said universities don’t have to
provide those services themselves. “They can outsource them, the way
that corporations do.”
To provide such things as security and
counseling, said Martin, “You can hire outside firms, on a contract
basis with competitive bidding. All these activities are a distraction
from what the institution is supposed to be doing.”
Universities
and colleges continued adding employees even after the beginning of the
economic downturn, though at a slightly slower rate, the federal figures
show.
“Institutions have said that they were hurting, so I would
have thought that staffing overall would go down,” Desrochers said. “But
it didn’t.”
There’s also been a massive hiring boom in central
offices of public university systems and universities with more than one
campus, according to the figures. The number of employees in central
system offices has increased six-fold since 1987, and the number of
administrators in them by a factor of more than 34.
One example, the central office of the California State University System, now has a budget bigger than those of three of the system’s 23 campuses.
“None
of them have reduced campus administrative burdens at all,” said King,
who said he is particularly frustrated by this trend. “They’ve added a
layer of bureaucracy, and in 95 percent of the cases it’s an unnecessary
bureaucracy and a counterproductive one.”
Centralization has been
promoted as a way to reduce costs, but Vedder points out that it has
not appeared to reduce the rate of hiring of administrators and
professional staffs on campus—or of incessant spikes in tuition.
“It’s
almost Orwellian,” said Vedder. “They’ll say, ‘We’ll save money if we
centralize.’ Then they hire a provost or associate provost or an
assistant business manager in charge of shared services, and then that
person hires an assistant, and you end up with more people than you
started with.”
In higher education, “Everyone now is a chief,” he said. “And there are a lot fewer Indians.”This story was prepared by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news center based at Boston University and WGBH Radio/TV.